Two long-running 2020 election denier legal cases brought by a pair of Republican officials in sparsely populated Fulton County have just arrived at separate final decisions in June. (Opinons linked below.)

The office of Pennsylvania Commonwealth Secretary Al Schmidt prevailed in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which ruled against Fulton’s claim that its illegal election intrusion shouldn’t have led to its voting systems being de-certified.

Dominion Voting Systems won a federal appeals court decision affirming the final dismissal of Fulton County’s long-running election denial lawsuits.

The one-page ruling affirming Fulton’s loss by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court will ultimately cost two local Republican officials, Randy Bunch and Stuart Ulsh, their rural county government, and its fake elector lawyer, Thomas Carroll Esq., up to $1 million, each.

Both litigations are over four years after a pair of southwestern Pennsylvania elected Republican 2020 election deniers initiated their government-fueled litigation spree with a fake elector lawyer.

Both have cases reached stopping points on the merits within the state and federal court systems now that Fulton County has lost what will likely be the final two appellate rulings in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit.

Inevitably, delayed consequences await.

The federal court decision will give Dominion Voting Systems access to its breached gear by year-end.

Because the attorney Carroll had already appealed the state Supreme Court’s earlier contempt ruling directly to the U.S. Supreme Court and lost last October, there are no further possible appeals of the impending final order of judgment exceeding $1 million against the three men jointly and severally, as well as against Fulton County, based upon last year’s accounting of fees and costs.

"We appreciate the court's careful decision to dismiss this frivolous lawsuit," said a spokesperson for Dominion Voting Systems when reached for comment on their victory in court.

The lawsuits filed in these two Pennsylvania cases stemmed from a national propaganda campaign underwritten to benefit the Trump 2020 Campaign by the now-President of the National Rifle Association, William “Bill” Bachenberg, carried out to make false propaganda to undermine the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.

To this day, nobody knows who paid Caroll’s attorney fees except that his clients say it is not them, nor Fulton County taxpayers directly.

Story continues below:

Bachenberg recently settled a lawsuit in Eastern Michigan federal district court last month filed by a cybersecurity expert whom the Allentown resident and former tech CEO hired to inadvertently breach Fulton County’s elections systems and those of other Michigan counties.

But his lawyer, Stephanie Lambert, is still facing legal liability for her actions as the NRA President’s lawyer. Story continues below:

How did two election deniers, a fake elector, and a rural county spend five years losing in court?

Mountainous Fulton County’s Election Board separately sued defendants Dominion Voting Systems and Pennsylvania Commonwealth Secretary Al Schmidt.

In Fulton County, during non-local election years, the Commission serves as the county Election Board. Bunch still serves on Fulton County’s Commission, where his term runs through the end of 2028, but Ulsh lost his attempt at a 3rd term last November.

Then-Fulton County Commissioners Randy Bunch (R) and Stuart Ulsh (R) had permitted an uncertified tech company from Chester, Pennsylvania, named Wake TSI, to breach county election systems in their dual roles as members of the County Election Board in late 2020.

Word got out about the impermissible inspection, and Pa. Secretary Schmidt’s office responded by decertifying Fulton County’s Dominion Voting Systems ballot marking devices.

After incurring a $25,000 replacement expense, Fulton County sued the Secretary on behalf of its 11,000 residents.

Contemporaneously, Dominion Voting Systems invoked its legal rights in response to Fulton County’s grievous 2020 breach of its license agreements when it distributed proprietary voting hardware and software to uncertified 3rd parties.

Fulton County promptly sued Dominion Voting Systems in federal court, alleging breaches of warranty and a variety of baseless claims, which were dismissed two years later.

The weak federal case against Dominion was then refiled by Ulsh and Bunch as then-County Election Board members and in their individual capacities.

Both appeals were finalized within two weeks after five years of litigation

On June 11th, 2025, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court issued an unsigned per curiam ruling in favor of the Secretary’s office, upholding its lower court win in the Commonwealth Court over Fulton County.

It upheld the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court’s order, which sided with Schmidt’s office on the merits of the underlying decertification case.

This state case was the County, Ulsh, and Bunch's final appeal from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s earlier final holding that the County, they, and their counsel, 2020 PA fake elector Thomas Carroll, Esq., violated the high court’s injunction by allowing a further election breach.

In a separate six-page opinion filed just twelve days later on June 23rd, 2025, a majority panel of the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed Dominion Voting Systems’ final dismissal of Fulton County, Ulsh, and Bunch’s unproven claims Because the full panel did not make the 3rd Circuit’s decision, it is not precedential.

By the end, the case presented no novel legal theories at all; the two Republicans had omitted the County itself from their complaint, depriving themselves of being party to the disputed contract with Dominion. Nonetheless, the election deniers litigated that point for two years.

The new Pa. Supreme Court decision also ends the necessity for a third-party escrow company to hold Fulton County’s breached voting machines at a cost of over $16,000 annually, paving the way for Dominion Voting Systems to examine them for the first time in five years.

Fulton County, its commissioners, and its fake elector lawyer could still challenge both cases to the U.S. Supreme Court within 90 days of last month’s decisions.

However, they have challenged every other final ruling in the two cases to the US Supreme Court, and have been rejected without a written ruling in every other instance.

When asked for comment, specifically to determine if they intend to appeal their losses further, neither the Fulton County Commission nor Commissioner Bunch responded to a telephone message left at the government offices. Fulton’s lawyer, Thomas J. Carroll, also failed to respond to a written and voicemail request for comment. Pennsylvania

Commonwealth Secretary Al Schmidt referred a direct message request for comment to his official office, which failed to respond before publication.

Click here for the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals opinion, Fulton County et. al. vs. Dominion Voting Systems:

Click here for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s per curiam order in Fulton County et al, vs. Pa. Commonwealth Sec. Al Schmidt:

The President of the NRA just paid a monetary settlement to the Israeli-born right-wing computer expert to end a federal defamation and contract lawsuit.

This past week, NRA President and close Trump associate William “Bill” Bachenberg personally paid $500,000 to XR Vision Ltd. and Yaacov Apelbaum, its proprietor, who is a global cybersecurity expert. Bachenberg had hired Apelbaum to breach multiple 2020 county-level election systems unknowingly.

His attorney agreed to payment of the demand in the lawsuit in full for $500,000 in exchange for dismissal of Bachenberg.

It is a tremendous admission by the Pennsylvania Republican mastermind, Bill Bachenberg, that in 2020, he participated in breaching or financing election attacks in multiple states while he was part of the Trump campaign using a pair of lawyers as co-conspirators.

However, the gun rights leader’s lawyer failed to settle the case with all parties, leading to a new round of litigation in his desperate bid to include his currently criminally accused lawyer, Stephanie Lambert Jutilla, Esq., in the now-completed settlement.

It’s a settlement Bachenberg’s lawyer orchestrated that expressly did not include her or her law firm’s name in writing or any way.

“I would NEVER tell a client to wire $500,000 to close out a case without explicit settlement terms in writing,” says former MSNBC and Fox News guest, DC attorney Bradley Moss, Esq., who reviewed the proceedings. “Without it, you don’t know what you can ethically advise your client is the end result of the settlement!”

Apelbaum’s lawyers have moved for permanent dismissal of only Bachenberg from the case and to keep going against his counsel.

Florida-based attorneys for Lambert, his lawyer, have cross-moved for the inclusion of her and her law firm in the final dismissal of the case.

The botched settlement comes in a civil case that, two years ago, drew national attention when it inadvertently revealed the hidden connections between Republican partisan breaches of election systems in three states, featuring lawyer Sidney Powell.

Eventually, criminal investigators from Fulton County (remove this), Atlanta District Attorney Fani Willis, who’d filed a wide-ranging racketeering indictment against Donald Trump and eighteen of his associates, came to use the Eastern Michigan lawsuit as a means of seeking more information about Powell’s associates and activities in Georgia.

In October 2023, Texas lawyer Powell appeared in an Atlanta courthouse to admit guilt and deliver a handwritten letter of apology for committing her crimes in Coffee County, Georgia, as part of her deal.

NRA President Bachenberg’s other lawyer during the 2020 election, Sidney Powell, pleaded guilty to six misdemeanors and other crimes.

It was 13 words long.

How did Bill Bachenberg become the NRA’s President, and how did he get sued for election interference?

Retired tech CEO Bill Bachenberg lives just outside of Allentown, Pennsylvania, where he is a local whale in Republican politics.

He was also the Chair of Pennsylvania's fake electors for Donald Trump in 2020.

A well-placed source in southeastern Pennsylvania says Bachenberg is strongly considering forming an exploratory committee to challenge Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) in 2026.

As a close associate of the Trump family, he also personally financed the GOP's attack on the 2020 elections in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Georgia, which became the basis for years of false stolen election claims by the Republican Party.

This past December, Bill Bachenberg served as a legitimate elector in Pennsylvania for Donald Trump.

And on April 25th, 2025, he ascended to the position of President of the National Rifle Association.

Yaacov Apelbaum, who sued the now-NRA President, has extensive connections to Israel’s intelligence and technology communities. He is the first person to have copied a controversial hard drive from a computer owned by Hunter Biden, the son of former President Joe Biden.

That hard drive created a multi-year political firestorm.

Apelbaum is also a blogger with an eponymous website and a contributor to The Gateway Pundit, a right-wing political website run by Jim Hoft, who settled a major 2020 election-related defamation case himself last year.

So it came to be that in July 2023, Yaacov Apelbaum sued Bachenberg and his Detroit-based lawyer, Stephanie Lambert Jutilla, in Michigan’s Eastern District Court for failure to pay for his services.

The now-NRA President had hired the cybersecurity expert to examine election equipment Lambert had procured as his agent from Michigan and Pennsylvania.

He also used Lambert as the conduit for sending funds for both hiring Apelbaum and attorney Sidney Powell’s activities, which led her to plead guilty to related felony state election interference charges in Georgia.

The Michigan lawyer is herself facing a criminal trial in Oakland County, Michigan, with a special prosecutor who indicted her in 2020 on allegations of illegally interfering in four different Michigan counties’ election systems.

Bachenberg asked Apelbaum to deliver his cyber-investigation conclusions in a Michigan airport lounge.

But when the Israeli-born computer expert’s findings found no tampering and did not confirm Bachenberg’s prior conclusions of election fraud, the man who ran the 2020 Trump campaign’s official sportsmen outreach group, allegedly decided to stiff Apelbaum.

Lambert also allegedly defamed Apelbaum over his work product.

Bachenberg paid to settle, but for whom did he settle?

Last month, the NRA President’s lawyers filed a motion to withdraw, saying their client had “ghosted” them, and within just a month of his new lawyers’ appearance, Bachenberg moved to settle the case for good.

However, there is a new dispute arising from Bill Bachenberg’s decision to settle.

In other words, the Israeli cybersecurity expert wants to continue the case against the NRA President’s lawyer because his new counsel did not expressly include his lawyer, Stephanie Lambert Jutilla, Esq., in the emails and draft orders settling his role in the dispute.

“There appear to be significant and legitimate disputes between the parties on whether the settlement applied only to Bachenberg or to all defendants,” says Moss, the attorney.

“I find it likely that the judge may request additional pleadings, before convening a hearing, and before the Order is executed.”

After a status conference held on the afternoon of June 23rd, Eastern District federal judge Hon. Robert J. White set a hearing for July 14th, 2025, at 2 pm in front of the court.

“It’s unusual not to include whether payment of a lawsuit’s settlement is deemed an admission of liability for the facts of the case,” says an experienced federal civil litigator in Florida who reviewed the documents. “It certainly leaves open room as to the defendant’s intention as to why they settled this suit this way.”

Apelbaum’s lawyers did not respond to multiple messages for comment on this story.

The attorney representing a whistleblower with information about an illegal surveillance scheme targeting Democratic congressional leadership with Donald Trump’s alleged knowledge just gave an exclusive interview about his client’s never-before-reported audio recordings and the response to his letter to the Senate.

He also revealed that federal law enforcement received the same information his client had delivered to Congress.

Investigators from the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence have already met on Capitol Hill with the whistleblower, and their lawyer Dan Meyer, National Security Partner at Tully Rinckey just revealed exclusively, “The recordings have actually been heard.”

Meyer says his client’s whistleblower report has been “formally through the intake process at the Senate Intelligence Committee. In that process, it's the counsels for both the majority and minority members that met with the whistleblower. I [attended] telephonically.”

“So both the Democratic and the Republican, General Counsels on the Senate Intelligence Committee were on the call when the whistleblower played from the recordings,” explained the lawyer, who is himself a three-time whistleblower.

In Meyer's previous government service work, he helped establish the intelligence community’s whistleblower protection program. From 2013 through 2017 he served as the federal government's Executive Director for Intelligence Community Whistleblowing & Source Protection.

“They were snippets,” explained the veteran lawyer about how much of the whistleblower’s recordings were shared with the Senate Intel committee’s staff attorneys. “It was not the entire three hours.”

Congressional staffers reviewed the material for benefits related to foreign intelligence, not enforcing U.S. law.

“But it was enough to do the intake process and now under their, their procedures,” explained Meyer. “The counsels will brief the members and then the committee will decide whether [their investigation] is going to go further. They're doing that on the foreign intelligence side; that’s their concern. They're not a law enforcement entity.”

However, that doesn’t preclude a law enforcement response to the serious allegations related to unlawful domestic activity linked to former President Trump. Merely this is not the specific venue where those matters are tackled.

“We are following up with the Federal Bureau of Investigation so that the national security division at the FBI can decide whether there's a matter for them to pursue,” revealed Meyer, for the first time sharing where else information about the whistleblower’s recordings has landed. “That could also include other entities within the FBI if the information is sufficient to follow up on. The other concern that the whistleblower raised, is that there was an attempt to gain the software on voting machines”

This isn’t the end of reporting about a scheme driven by former intelligence officers to influence members of Congress—with the knowledge of the former President—and to impact the 2024 election.

But it is the end of the beginning.

Here’s a link to our previous report on this matter:

A leaked memo from one of Washington’s most respected whistleblower lawyers to Congressional leadership overseeing the US intelligence community reveals a plot to use advanced technology to conduct an “unlawful private intelligence operation within the United States” with the knowledge of the former President.

Lawyer Dan P. Meyer drafted the memo (embedded below) alleging wrongdoing by a whistleblower he represents and indicated the information he has relates to election interference campaigns from 2020 through the present.

He shared it with Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA) and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner (R-MI), as well as Senators Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), requesting time for his client to brief a Congressional committee.

Meyer’s last job in the federal government was as the Executive Director for Intelligence Community Whistleblowing and Source Protection from 2013 to 2017, after a career spanning decades of service in the Navy and later as an Inspector General within the Department of Defense.

In dry prose, the DC lawyer reveals his client is aware of a plot to surveil members of Congress.

He says his client has information revealing the targets of the program include Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), and former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA). He wrote:

The private surveillance program was run by former or retired employees of the United States Intelligence Community. The third party in contact with our client indicated former President Donald Trump was knowledgeable of the private surveillance program.

A source familiar with the matter told The Stern Facts on the condition of anonymity that Meyer’s client previously testified on Capitol Hill to the Senate Finance Committee about tax matters.

Without revealing the specific aims of the illegal surveillance operations, the memo states it intends to continue efforts related to the Trump campaign’s 2020 election manipulation operations, using “working partnerships” with intelligence officers.

Additionally, the former DOD official states his client has information related to former Trump advisors Rudy Giuliani, Roger Stone and the imprisoned Steve Bannon who “used manipulated data regarding Hunter Biden’s laptop to affect public affairs.”

Here’s a copy of the memo:

Correction: Attorney Dan C. Meyer was previously identified as Daniel.

This story contains a correction.

A new filing in the United States Supreme Court by Arizona's failed 2022 Republican gubernatorial candidate just exposed new election breaches sparking new state-level Department of State investigations in two different states.

Republican politician Kari Lake submitted the filing containing a sworn declaration from a purported cyber security expert in the last ditch petition for certiorari contesting the use of electronic voting machines in her 2022 election loss, alongside the losing 2022 Arizona GOP Secretary of State candidate Mark Finchem.

Newly obtained public records from the Pennsylvania Secretary of State (PaDOS) indicate they’re taking action based on her revelations to the U.S. Supreme Court (document linked below). This story is part one of three about those records.

Officials from Georgia’s Secretary of State confirmed the existence of their investigation in Macon-Bibb County earlier this month in response to a complaint filed by a nonprofit election security organization.

Buried inside Lake’s 48th page in a 178-page document innocuously titled “APPENDIX TO PETITIONERS’ MOTION TO EXPEDITE” there is a statement from Benjamin Cotton of the cybersecurity firm CyFIR LLC. (image below)

Under penalty of perjury, Cotton declares that he had inspected election systems in a lengthy list of counties. It reads: 

“In the course of my duties, I have forensically examined Dominion Voting Systems (DVS) components in Maricopa County Arizona, Antrim County Michigan, Fulton County Pennsylvania, Coffee County Georgia, Mesa County Colorado, and Bibb County Georgia, hereinafter referred to as the “Analyzed Election County Components.”

“What Ben Cotton finally admitted to in the Supreme Court filing, I've been saying for over a year,” says Mike Ryan who blew the whistle on his former NRA Board Member' boss’ role in Pennsylvania’s election breaches.

Indeed, Benjamin Cotton did participate in the 2020 Arizona election audit led by election deniers with a company called Cyber Ninjas as a subcontractor.

That audit forced Arizona’s Maricopa County to spend $3 million replacing its tainted election machines. In mid-2021, he absconded in a car from the Phoenix audit with possession of the County’s hard drives with voter data, which he brought to a cabin in Montana, that property records show he owned.*

Neither the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Secretary or Department of State nor their attorney responded to written or phone requests for comment sent a week before the public records request or before this story’s publication while investigating Lake’s court filing.

It was the new records PaDOS produced after failing to respond for comment which revealed a pair of never-before reported motions filed on the Secretary’s behalf to the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court—its intermediate appeals court for civil matters—which is the original venue Fulton County used to file a petition challenging their decision to decertify its Dominion Voting Systems machines.

The state agency is using the Cotton declaration in Lake’s appendix to supplement a recent, exhaustively documented 86-page motion against Fulton County filed on February 16th, 2024 with 572 pages of exhibits. 

In its newly revealed April 3rd, 2024 motion to the Commonwealth Court from the state’s public records production it includes the state’s 9-page supplemental motion with 76 new pages of exhibits focusing partly on Cotton’s revelations. 

That is where Attorney Robert Wiygul on behalf of PaDOStold the Commonwealth Court that CyFIR’s Cotton made admissions which mean it is newly possible the County again breached the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court’s injunctive orders and rulings holding the local officials in contempt of court.

The estimated 14,382 residents of Fulton County, Pennsylvania are already on the hook for over $700,000 in contempt of court fees imposed by the state Supreme Court related to decisions by the two Republican members of their County Commission serving in their capacity as members of its County Election Board.

Fulton County Commissioner Randy Bunch (R) and former Commissioner Stuart Ulsh (R) permitted the initial breach of their election systems and a second intrusion which took place in April 2022, openly defying the state Supreme Court’s injunctive order against such an inspection.

“Mr. Cotton's Declaration does not identify when his forensic examination occurred. Based on a previous declaration by Mr. Cotton, however, it appears clear that the examination took place at some point after June 8, 2022, i.e., after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had issued its January 2022 injunction,” wrote Wiygul in the motion. 

“...Petitioners' decision to allow Mr. Cotton to conduct a forensic examination of the voting system was, if not a willful, bad-faith violation of the Supreme Court's January 2022 injunction,” attorneys for PaDOS wrote, “then a willful, bad-faith violation of the Supreme Court's April 2023 decision providing that any party seeking to obtain evidence from the voting system must file an application with the Commonwealth Court.”

Legally, the Secretary is asking the court to admit Cotton’s statement as more evidence of the County’s unclean hands in their motion to end the recalcitrant county’s suit in the Commonwealth Court with a Summary Judgment ruling. 

“What do you win in this case if you win? If you win, what do you get?” says longtime former Fulton County solicitor Stanley Kerlin, who is also the county Republican Party’s state committeeman. “Anyone who thinks the U.S. Supreme Court is going to do anything about this county’s 2020 election lawsuits is delusional.”

He says that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court does have the inherent power of criminal contempt which it could use to punish violations of its orders if it so chooses.

“Could they change or modify their contempt citation with this new information?” says Kerlin, “They’re the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, they can if they wish.”

Fulton Commissioner Bunch did not reply to an email seeking comment on this story. A voicemail message seeking comment for this story left at former Commissioner Ulsh’s excavation business listed on his public LinkedIn profile went unreturned.

Pennsylvania isn’t the only state where Lake’s declaration made ripples.

Non-profit activists at Free Speech for People and the Coalition for Good Government saw Lake’s filing in March.

They used it to file a complaint with Georiga’s State Election Board which consists of five members picked by the state’s Governor, each of its two major political parties, and each of its two legislative houses.

Because of that complaint, earlier this month Georgia’s Secretary of State publicly confirmed it is investigating the matter to the Georgia Recorder:

State Election Board Chairman John Fervier said members will not comment on the allegation while the Secretary of State’s office investigation is underway. 

“Once the investigation has been completed, then the SEB will be in a position to hear the facts of the case and make a determination as to what actions, if any, might be necessary,” said Fervier, who was appointed by Gov. Brian Kemp in January as election board chairman.

“One of the early indicators that there was a breach in Coffee County, Georgia was Cotton’s testimony in various declarations,” says Free Speech For People’s senior advisor on election security Susan Greenhalgh, “which let investigators get discovery, and which is why we don’t take this declaration lightly.”

Both Cotton and Macon-Bibb County denied any wrongdoing in response to the Recorder’s report.

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Events in small, rural Coffee County 200 miles south of Atlanta have already led to multiple charges and convictions in Fulton County, Georgia DA Fani Willis’ sprawling RICO case. 

“We obtained text messages involving an attorney who serves as counsel to both Coffee County and neighboring Ware County on behalf of Hall Booth Smith, a firm whose roster has included other attorneys implicated in the effort to overturn Georgia's elections,” says Greenhalgh. “The texts suggest that allegations the Trump campaign obtained a voting system from Ware County, GA may be true, prompting us to send an additional complaint and request for an investigation of the alleged breach to the Georgia State Election Board."

Free Speech For People recently filed a new complaint with Georgia’s State Election Board about Ware County’s activities. Just last week, Georgia’s Secretary of State had to sever its link to Coffee County after it was hit by a cyberattack.

Notably, it wasn’t a local prosecutor who discovered the illegal activity in Coffee County, but the Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney whose RICO charges led to a guilty plea and written apology by pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell in late 2023. 

Powell’s plea in Georgia implicates one of her co-conspirators, identified by her acts in the RICO indictment as Michigan lawyer Stephanie Lambert. 

Perhaps not coincidentally, Lambert became the Special Counsel to Fulton County, Pennsylvania on April 12th, 2022 right before the start of a new breach of its election systems, despite not holding a license to practice law in the state. 

The Georgia indictment is also part of the 500+ pages of exhibits submitted by Pennsylvania’s Secretary of State in its court filings.

Last week, former TV newscaster Kari Lake received a final decision on her petition to the United States Supreme Court challenging the accuracy of Arizona’s voting machines, whose motion to expedite was supported by a sworn declaration from CyFIR’s Benjamin Cotton.

It was denied.

Lake continues to run for public office in Arizona where she is currently the establishment choice for the GOP nomination for US Senate with the full support of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

* Correction: Ben Cotton did not take the voting tabulators, but rather hard drives containing voter data.

Here is Cotton’s sworn declaration:

Here is the PaDOS motion including Cotton’s declaration:

New evidence emerged that Special Counsel Jack Smith’s probe in Washington, D.C., and the Fulton County (Georgia) District Attorney’s probe are homing in on one man: the chairman of Pennsylvania’s fake electors, himself a major Trump supporter and confidant.

This is the first report showing both investigations converging and confirms CNN’s report about election equipment is a new focus of the Special Counsel’s office under Smith.

Two sources say a senior investigator for Fulton County Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis’ office contacted them about William “Bill” Bachenberg, a former NRA Board Member and chairman of Pennsylvania’s Republican 2020 electors who submitted a conditional certificate. He also served the 2020 Trump campaign directly as the Sportsmen for Trump co-chair, working with Donald Trump Jr. and his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle.

One of those sources requested personal anonymity to speak freely about contacts with prosecutors on behalf of a civil plaintiff’s counsel for fear of physical retribution.

The other spoke on the record.

A spokesperson for the lawyers representing cybersecurity firm XRVision, who is suing Bill Bachenberg and his Detroit-based attorney Stefanie Lambert (also known as Stefanie Jutilla or sometimes Stefanie Lambert Juttila).

The spokesperson said they had been contacted by a senior investigator from the Fulton County, Georgia, DA’s office by email in “hopes of locating attorneys representing Mr. Bachenberg.”

XRVision is trying to serve both parties, its spokesperson says, but is “likely to seek a motion for alternative service if they can’t be found.”

“Got a call from CNN today,” the spokesperson added.

Whistleblower Mike Ryan shared emailed messages he exchanged with Fulton County, Georgia, investigators who later verbally expressed interest in learning more about his time working for the former NRA board member.

Both he and the XRVision lawyers’ spokesperson named the same senior investigator for Fulton County as their contact.

Ryan also revealed FBI agents working with the Special Counsel’s investigation contacted him two weeks ago about the election intrusion in Pennsylvania and his former boss, Bachenberg, a retired cybersecurity executive.

“They were very interested in my former boss, Bill Bachenberg,” says Mr. Ryan, “and his involvement with Sidney Powell and the lawyer they shared, Stefanie Lambert.”

Agents asked him about the Allentown, Pennsylvania-based Republican’s role in the multi-state operations to intrude on voting machines in Fulton County, Pennsylvania, Antrim County, Michigan, Coffee County, Georga, and Maricopa County, Arizona, in that chronological order.

Bill Bachenberg is a co-defendant being sued in federal court for his role as Stephanie Lambert’s source of funds, as revealed in this website’s previous report on this scheme. Georgia prosecutors cited Lambert’s payments to Sidney Powell in their racketeering indictment but didn’t reveal the payments’ source.

Ryan believes there may be a not previously understood connection between Bachenberg, Lambert, and the Georgia payments.

For this report focusing on Pennsylvania, the below visual aid is to help visually explain the relationships between the numerous lawyers, different counties, and Bill Bachenberg.

The story continues below this relational chart:

A phone call for comment to Lehigh Valley Sports Clays, a shooting venue owned by Bachenberg, led to his Executive Assistant Lori Stroll responding: “We have no comment. Thank you.” He did not return a phone call or text message seeking comment.

Lambert and Sidney Powell both won a recent appeal overturning federal court sanctions against them (for being filed too late in the lower court), and the former defeated a Michigan bar disciplinary case.

Nevertheless, both women are under indictment for election intrusions in Michigan and Georgia, respectively.

Despite waiting until late in the evening before exchanging multiple text messages before publication, Stefanie Lambert refused to comment on her own behalf, even to answer the first question, which read: “Are you licensed to practice law in Pennsylvania?”

“My clients specifically requested that I give you a follow up statement,” she wrote. “I’m speaking on behalf of Fulton County, [Pennsylvania].”

Fulton County’s Commissioners told a story their “Special Counsel” didn’t want to answer.

That is why this reporter attended and video recorded a public County Commission meeting held in Fulton County’s office buildings on September 26th, 2023, a week before exchanging texts with Lambert.

A deep fog of steely grey skies and softly sprinkling rain descended upon the road for nearly the entirety of a two-day journey into the Appalachians over Tuscarora Mountain to the historically designated town of McConnellsburg, Pa., to obtain comment directly from Commissioners Ulsh and Bunch.

As of the time of writing, the County has not published the minutes of that meeting nearly one week later, but Commissioner Ulsh has demanded a copy of this reporter’s video recording without any legal authority.

“Is special counsel Stephanie Lambert,” this reporter asked, “licensed to practice law in Pennsylvania?”

“How. We, I’ve talked to,” stammered Commissioner Ulsh while spinning a pen in his hand, “I always deal with Tom Carroll, is who I deal with.”

Rocking back and forth in his chair, Commissioner Bunch only briefly removed his hand from his mouth, where he held a pen to quickly add, “Tom Carroll’s our contact.”

“But Stephanie was also,” explained Commissioner Paula J. Shives, “you guys did vote to have her as special counsel.” She had voted against hiring Lambert and Carroll, later saying she was against hiring any counsel to file suit on the County’s behalf over the 2020 election.

“She works for, works for Tom, yea,” shot back Commissioner Ulsh.

“Yeah. But my understanding was when I looked her up, she was under license in Michigan, I think?” explained Commissioner Shives, noting the two lawyers never contacted her.

Commissioner Ulsh said, “I’ve never seen any numbers” and did not know if either Lambert or Caroll had been paid for the last 18 months of their work for Fulton County when asked. He concluded, “It is, it’s pro bono is what the contract says. That’s what we signed.”

Having set down his pen, Commissioner Bunch replied, “Pro bono is us.” 

Election breaches started in Fulton County, Pennsylvania, and its officials are still fighting to keep its Dominion Voting Machines at great cost.

A little background information is necessary to understand when Stephanie Lambert came to be hired as a Special Counsel, and the County landed in a spiral of losing court cases and mounting lawyer fees.

Initially, Sidney Powell directed a company named WakeTSI to inspect rural Fulton County, Pennsylvania’s voting machines on December 31st, 2020.

The two Commissioners Ulsh and Bunch worked at the initial behest of Republican Pennsylvania State Senators Judy Ward—who has offices in the county seat of McConnelsburg— and Doug Mastriano, who represents neighboring Gettysburg and Chambersburg.

At the time, the County’s commissioners served in a dual capacity as its Board of Elections.

Based 35 miles outside Philadelphia in West Chester, WakeTSI issued a report on February 19th, 2021, with a strange alteration reported by the Post.

Under the state’s Right To Know Law (RTKL), Fulton County produced an email two weeks ago from WakeTSI co-founder and Executive Vice President Gene Kern to Commissioners Ulsh and Bunch, which reads:

“Would you please share a personal email address with me? Gene Kern, EVP”

Last week, the County’s Chief Clerk Stacy Golden sent a 30-day legal review extension before production to a set of four follow-up RTKL requests but confirmed in writing the existence of private emails and private text messages between the commissioners and the voting vendor’s senior official.

By July 2021, WakeTSI’s inspection had already led the Pennsylvania Secretary of State to decertify Fulton County’s Dominion Voting Systems election machines.

In response, Fulton County switched to Hart InterCivic Voting systems and filed suit against the Secretary of State over its decision in late 2021.

During the suit’s early stages, the Secretary of State learned of a prospective election intrusion by a company called “Sage Envoy LLC” and obtained an injunctive order from the Pa. Supreme Court in early 2022.

Then, the two Fulton County Commissioners fired its previous lawyers in an emergency act on April 12th, 2022, and voted to hire both Pottstown, Pa. lawyer Thomas J. Carroll and the Detroit-based Stephanie Lambert. Carroll signed a 2020 Pennsylvania Republican conditional elector’s certificate alongside Bachenberg. He also filed a failed voting fraud lawsuit in Pennsylvania’s eastern Delaware County that suffered a stinging defeat last summer when it was dismissed by an elected judge who ran as a Republican.

When asked in person if the Commissioners knew about Carrol participating in signing a conditional Republican electoral college certificate, Bunch said, “I wasn’t aware of that,” and Ulsh claimed, “I didn’t even know he was even Republican; I’ve never talked anything politics to him.”

By July 13th and 14th of 2022, Commissioner Bunch admitted under oath at an evidentiary hearing in the case this August that he personally witnessed a new intrusion into the County’s voting machines by Speckin Forensics LLC.

Neither man answered when asked how Speckin Forensics came to be hired by the County, starting a chain of events leading to a nearly $500,000 and growing contempt of court bill coming due against the 14,000-person County.

A week later, their “counsel” Stefanie Lambert proffered this explanation on October 2nd: “Fulton County sued Dominion for breach of contract after engaging a world recognized forensic firm, Speckin Forensics. Speckin Forensics discovered on the election equipment a malicious python script with international communication to Canada.” (The latter statement about scripts and Canada is not considered credulous in light of other companies’ findings.)

Her entire rationale for hiring that firm is their use in the breach of contract lawsuit Lambert touted.

Yet, just last week, on September 28th, 2023, a federal Middle District of Pennsylvania judge issued a pair of orders that dismissed most of Fulton County’s federal claims against Dominion Voting Systems with prejudice, which is forever.

Gone are allegations that include breach of contract and breach of express warranty claims.

The judge left a narrow window to amend Fulton County’s lawsuit and try again one last time for breach of the underlying agreement.

The judge ruled that “the shortcomings in its allegations are not overcome by the expert reports attached to and referenced in the complaint,” meaning that none of Speckin’s expert reports helped to get Fulton County through the dismissal proceeding.

Fulton County, Pennsylvania, uses an unlicensed attorney practicing illegally, which may be a crime in that state.

Her so-called clients are two Fulton County Commissioners, Randy Bunch and Stuart L. Ulsh, both Republicans, who hired Lambert as Special Counsel last year and facilitated inspections by WakeTSI that led to ongoing litigation in Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court, which found the County in contempt of court this past April.

These clients are so-called because searches of the Pennsylvania Bar have no record of Stephanie Lambert being a member under an alias.

Carolyn Kerlin attended the September 26th public meeting, giving the commissioners five minutes of sharp questions about the costs the County incurred and specific questions about court testimony, and afterward, she introduced us to her husband.

Stanley Kerlin, Esq. is the County’s former solicitor, to comment on the voting machine intrusions, its new Special Counsels, and what happened in his once politically peaceful small town.

He has 28 years of experience until he returned to full-time private practice in 2019, right across the street from the McConnelsburg County Courthouse, about 100 paces from his previous workplace.

Is Stephanie Lambert allowed to practice law in Fulton County, Pennsylvania?

“No,” was Kerlin’s staccato reply to the question, barely waiting for the end of the question. “She never even got admitted pro hac vice.”

Pennsylvania law makes it a 1st or 2nd-degree misdemeanor to impersonate the holder of an occupational or professional license. Sentences can last up to five years in prison. Federal Eastern District of Pennsylvania prosecutors have prosecuted outright fake lawyers under fraud statutes.

A review of proceedings held by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to enforce its injunction order and issue contempt of court findings against her so-called clients shows Lambert was indeed denied pro hac vice (visiting) admission to practice multiple times.

The state bar of Pennsylvania does have reciprocity with Michigan. However, it is not automatic and requires the lawyer to meet educational and testing requirements and a bar evaluation before advising a municipal body.

One of the Bar admission requirements is “absence of prior conduct by the applicant which in the opinion of the Board indicates character and general qualifications (other than scholastic) incompatible with the standards expected to be observed by members of the bar of this Commonwealth;”

Stephanie Lambert got indicted on July 27th by a special prosecutor investigating her and failed Michigan GOP attorney general nominee Matt DePerno for a scheme to unlawfully obtain election tabulators in four small jurisdictions throughout the Wolverine State, including Antrim County. She maintains her innocence in a slickly produced video by a California political ad shop praised by former Trump White House Senior Advisor Steve Bannon.

When Mike Ryan asked the commissioners at the September 26th meeting if they knew of Lambert’s indictment, Commissioner Ulsh twice blatantly lied, “I don’t know anything about what’s going on in Michigan.”

Yet, a transcript from court proceedings 27 days earlier shows that counsel asked Commissioner Ulsh the same question under oath for the Pa. Secretary of State.

Commissioner Bunch remained silent.

“Stephanie Lambert is a crony of Sidney Powell, who is one of the conspirators indicted with Donald Trump in Georgia,” said Kerlin incredulously, his vibrant vocal inflections contrasting sharply against his tall but elderly frame. “Is she going to be magnanimous and pick up the tab? She probably has the money to do it.”

It gets expensive to violate Supreme Court orders.

The next chapter of this report explains former Solicitor Kerlin’s remarks about picking up the bill because just the act of bringing in Speckin Forensics to examine Fulton County’s voting systems will cost the County or its commissioners (or both; nobody is yet certain) a small fortune.

A recent report in Chambersberg’s newspaper, the Public Opinion, says the County’s bill from the state for legal fees stemming from sanctions incurred due to the Speckin Forensics breach and subsequent proceedings is $448,039.53 as of June 9th, 2023.

“The hole is so deep,” quipped Kerlin when he learned the figure, “they have to look up to see the bottom.”

The bill is likely far more after a litigious summer fighting over who should serve as escrow agent for their Dominion voting machines as a web of litigation is navigated by all parties.

That proceeding ended with a resounding thud for Fulton County after they selected Cerberus Dynamic Solutions, one of Lambert’s personal bodyguards, as a security company. In Greek mythology, the Cerberus is a vicious three-headed monster that guards the gates of hell.

The Florida-based company’s Cereberus’ head, Joseph Sabia, testified under oath that he wanted $442,500 for the first year of his company’s “escrow” services. (An escrow agent is supposed to be a neutral 3rd party, not a vendor to one of the parties.)

Indeed, the head of Cerberus later explained under oath that another one of his employees was protecting Fulton’s lawyer, Thomas Carroll, as a client at that very hearing.

The Secretary of State’s choice of an escrow agent, Pro V&V, asked for $16,840 to transport and store the machines for the first year and $850 a month thereafter, with climate controls, tampering seals, and using custom shipping materials to prevent physical injury at their Huntsville, Alabama-based NIST and EAC audited and certified laboratory.

When asked why he chose a vendor that charged 26 times what the Secretary of State proposed, Commissioner Ulsh softly answered, “Yeah, everything I was told it is cheaper.”

Sabia explained under oath how his work experience qualified him for the job. He spent nearly 20 years in the Navy, holding an interim secret clearance briefly before pulling his permanent application. After leaving military service as a runway air crewman & instructor, he began working as a safety officer for The Topps Company, Inc. in Scranton, Pa.

The company makes sports cards.

Next, the would-be election escrow agent became a truck driver, worked his way into a management role at a Pennslyvania company, and then founded a security company in tiny Callahan, Florida, just outside of Jacksonville in neighboring Nassau County with another military veteran. He was not registered as a foreign corporation when he testified to the Pa. Supreme Court’s Special Master Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer.

At his business partner’s home in the tiny town, the Cerburus company proposed using a ground-floor efficiency apartment to store the County’s voting machines if it requested a full proposal, which Sabia firmly said it did not.

Further questioning by counsel for the Pa. Secretary of State revealed that they found Sabia posted extremely anti-Semitic tweets and videos (which he still has posted), published a meme about the “plandemic” and the 2020 election being a lie because of 60 Minutes host Leslie Stahl, called himself an “election denier,” and stated on social media that he harbored a personal social media grudge by name against the Secretary after testifying under oath earlier that he had no idea who held the seat. Republican Al Schmidt serves as Secretary of the Commonwealth after his appointment by Gov. Josh Shapiro (D).

Sabia confirmed all of the above under oath.

Even counsel for Fulton County blanched at the revelation of their proposed contractor’s horrific statement about Jewish people, the Biden Cabinet, and gas ovens (which he since deleted from his Twitter account), but while they expressed deep embarrassment, they did not withdraw him from consideration.

The next appointment was late at the end of the September 26th meeting’s public comment period. So the Commissioners both graciously and unexpectedly re-opened public comment when asked who would foot the bill for the County’s contempt of court penalties.

“We’re questioning whether our insurance, the Errors & Omissions Insurance, would cover any sanctions by the state,” explained Commissioner Shiver, but even Mrs. Kerlin found that prospect dubious.

Her husband concurred.

“Most of these bills relate to contempt,” the longtime former County solicitor patiently explained. “Those are intentional acts. Will the insurance cover an intentional act and having been found in contempt? I don’t know the answer to that, but I can’t imagine it will. Insurance usually won’t cover intentional acts.”

“So if that [insurance] doesn’t cover it,” this reporter asked the Commission, “then who is going to have to pay the bill?”

“I guess the County?” replied Commissioner Shives, “if that’s how the state says who has to pay it. Definitely not budgeted for.”

With the last moments of public comment, Mike Ryan asked one more question to the assembled Commissioners: “How did you guys get introduced to the commissioners and the County as being screened for Special Counsel? How did you guys get introduced?”

“Uh, I was doing some searching and just come [sic] across a name and made a phone call,” answered Commissioner Ulsh the first time, shaking his head and looking down while clicking his pen. 

“Don’t know how I just was searching. I was searching for different things,” Ulsh answered the second time. “Different, different pages, different. I couldn’t tell you what I actually come [sic] across it on.”

“I didn’t talk to nobody,” he concluded.

Commissioner Bunch sat silently, shuffling papers, while Commissioner Shives shook her head and said, “There was no background discussion because I had to go home and Google him myself, both him [Carroll] and Stephanie Lambert, just to see who they were.” 

Left unsaid was that both Commissioners Ulsh and Bunch entered their litigation against the Pa. Secretary of State’s office in both their official and their personal capacities according to the captions of the action, leaving open the possibility that the elected officials themselves could be left on the hook for the mounting bills for their frequently failing election litigation.

Here is a copy of the video from that meeting:

Donald Trump’s seniormost campaign advisor demanded a legal wall of secrecy around civil deposition testimony in a federal civil case, citing his role in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of the former president for trying to overturn the 2020 election. (Documents shared at the bottom of the story.)

Jason Miller served as the Trump 2016 campaign’s Communications Director and senior advisor to the ill-fated Trump 2020 campaign and is currently in the same role on the ex-president’s 2024 campaign.

His lawyers from Greenberg Traurig served a 2-page letter and 12-page proposed protective order to the plaintiff in a pregnancy discrimination case against the 2106 Trump campaign.

Their stated goal in keeping Miller’s depositions a secret is to shield his campaign-related testimony from Special Counsel Jack Smith and a family court judge in Miami, Florida.

Miller’s former paramour, Harvard-trained lawyer A.J. Delgado, filed that federal suit in New York’s Southern District court. She served as his subordinate during the 2016 campaign.

In the letter’s subject, the high-powered lawyers wrote: “Re: Subpoena of July 12, 2023 Delgado v. Donald J. Trump for President et al., Case No. 19-cv-11764 (AT)” and wrote the following:

We represent Jason Miller, who was served with a third-party subpoena in the above-referenced case on the evening of Monday, July 31, 2023…..

Mr. Miller is willing to sit for a third-party deposition in the above-captioned suit notwithstanding that he was just served with this subpoena two days ago. But Mr. Miller is also protective of his minor child, and is also mindful of the Special Counsel’s recently unsealed indictment against the president. (author’s emphasis)

Right beneath the document’s title, “STIPULATED PROTECTIVE ORDER,” Miller’s proposed agreed order to the court contains the following language verbatim:

In the interests of ensuring efficient and prompt resolution of this action, mindful of third-party deponent Jason Miller’s privacy rights and the high-profile nature of this action, and to protect confidential information from improper disclosure or use in light of ongoing family law proceedings between Mr. Miller and Plaintiff Delgado as well as ongoing proceedings brought by the Special Counsel… (author’s emphasis)

Delgado informed this reporter that she “did not and will not” agree to the protective order proposed by the Trump advisor’s lawyers.

How unusual is the length and scope of the former Gettr social network CEO’s request for secrecy?

“This protective order is unusually broad and expansive for purposes of third-party witness testimony, and no doubt reflects ongoing concern by Miller that he may still get tied up in the former president’s criminal woes beyond being a mere fact witness,” says Washington, D.C. based lawyer Bradley Moss of the Mark Zaid P.C. firm, who has appeared as a legal commentator on both MSNBC and Fox News.

In September, Miller’s lawyers from Greenberg Traurig were highlighted in an Open Secrets story saying they’ve been paid $2.8 million from Trump’s political network, partly due to his testimony to the House’s Select Committee that investigated January 6th.

The above-described letter from Greenberg Traurig’s Nathan J. Muyskens, Esq. and proposed order refer to a separate proceeding in Florida, whereby Miller petitioned* Miami-Dade’s 11th Circuit Court in the summer of 2017 for paternity testing and it was, as a result, established that he is the father of Delgado's son, as she always maintained. (*This would make him the party who initiated the action.)

But in the more than six years since then, the Trump campaign official has opposed most attempts for Delgado to obtain his financial records and a deposition to finalize the child support proceedings. On his part, Miller has requested and obtained an extraordinary level of secrecy in the Florida case.

Recently, Jason Miller’s family court lawyer, Sandy T. Fox, Esq. successfully convinced state court Judge Hon. Spencer Jet Multack to issue an order to seal a 2019 letter the Trump advisor sent to the court. The document he personally signed indicated that he took steps to voluntarily commit himself to a medical institution for alcohol rehabilitation, as well as to handle his mental health problems.

Judge Multack’s order doesn’t cite any binding authority as to why Miller’s motion to strike, a legal avenue that only applies to pleadings and not notices of filing, is enough to remove a document from the public court docket. Nonetheless, Judge Multack struck the documents from the court record. (A copy of the now-sealed document is at the bottom of this report.)

Miller’s main job is advising a national political campaign whose primary political saw is criticizing President Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, for the results of his substance abuse problems, including the foreign funds he received from China.

Credible reporting indicates that while Jason Miller claimed the now-indicted expatriate Chinese national Guo Wengui did not control his former employer, the Gettr social network, he was actually communicating instructions with the Trump advisor during key moments.

“Jason Miller continuously demands absurd levels of VIP treatment from the courts. He demanded a confidentiality order in our family law matter in 2017 and has demanded secrecy protections in other litigation, even when he is the plaintiff,” says A.J. Delgado in reply to a request for comment on this story.

“Not even the Pope would demand such special treatment and such cloaks of secrecy,” she concluded.

When reached for comment about this story by email, Jason Miller replied with expletives and an ad hominem attack against this author. Despite being given a second opportunity to address questions about the substance of this report, he preferred to reiterate and expound upon his initial position but not to comment on this report. In a third and final request for comment, the Trump advisor referenced past defamatory remarks he made about his former lover.

Jason Miller’s Greenberg Traurig letter:

Jason Miller’s proposed protective order:

Jason Miller’s letter to Florida’s 11th Circuit Court about his voluntary commitment:

A former insider turned whistleblower just revealed ties between the Chair of Pennsylvania’s Republican fake electors and the indicted Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, implicating them in dark money cash flows to election auditors in four states with the goal of not solely contesting the 2020 results, but also tampering with future elections.

It is a scheme centered around the Chair of the Republican Party’s fake electors in Pennsylvania named William “Bill” Bachenberg. He was subpoenaed by the House Special Committee to Investigate January 6th in early 2022.

Groups Bachenberg directed were hired and paid for by attorneys acting as his cutouts starting in early 2021 and operating in Michigan, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Georgia through mid-2022.

The multi-state scheme involved Bill Bachenberg as a surreptitious paymaster and strategist funneling cash through lawyers Sidney Powell, who was at the time in Dallas, Texas, and Stephanie Lambert of Detroit, Michigan, to unlawfully obtain election tabulators. His lawyers thus delivered copies of Dominion election software and its hardware into the hands of unwitting cyber security companies who thought they were genuinely being paid to find system flaws.

It started to unravel in July 2023 when Bill Bachenberg didn’t pay his auditors, and one filed suit in federal court.

Bachenberg himself believed to be working at Donald Trump’s behest and had good reason to believe that, says whistleblower Mike Ryan. He said the semi-retired tech CEO often spoke of “seeing 45” or speaking with “45” after having had a direct role in the 2020 campaign managing an official coalition partner group.

In Georgia, the allegations outlined by Fulton County’s District Attorney Fani Willis that are leveled against Sidney Powell for her role in Trump’s 2020 election include her attempts to breach that state’s Coffee County election systems.

“It was a joint operation with Bill Bachenberg in Coffee County, Georgia,” says Ryan, who worked for Bachenberg as a professional fundraiser. “In an email that is mentioned in Fani Willis’ RICO indictment of Donald Trump, Act 155 describes how Stephanie Lambert got the invoices from a firm, SullivanStrickler, to breach Coffee County’s election systems. Powell hired them. Lambert is known to be referenced there as unindicted co-conspirator #30 in Georgia’s case against Trump.”

Thus, Bill Bachenberg’s funds were funneled into Sidney Powell’s hands in early January 2021 through the Michigan lawyer who is now indicted in her home state.

In Michigan and Pennsylvania, the transactions involving Bill Bachenberg and Lambert led to a July 2023 lawsuit over their refusal to release payment and for defamation filed by Yaakov Applebaum, a forensic technology specialist and former aide to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) who owns the cybersecurity company XRVision Ltd.

Applebaum is best known as the person hired by a Delaware computer store to copy a hard drive belonging to the beleaguered Hunter Biden’s laptop, son of the current President.

Now, the computer expert is seeking $550,000 in unpaid bills and $5 million each in compensatory and punitive damages from Bachenberg and Lambert for his services in tiny, rural Fulton County, Pennsylvania.

It was Bill Bachenberg’s funds that were sent to now-indicted Michigan lawyer Stephanie Lambert in the form of a million-dollar line of credit. She used that money to commission the alleged voting equipment tampering crime. Lambert is charged alongside Matt DePerno, the losing GOP Michigan Attorney General candidate who was also indicted in early August. A staunch Bannon ally, DePerno was one of Sidney Powell’s promoters for the shady non-profits who funded her Defending the Republic charity, which later landed them under investigation by Florida’s charity regulators.

Pennsylvania’s Secretary of State decertified voting machines in Fulton County because of the audits, which were also conducted by XRVision, WakeTSI, Speckin Forensics LLC, and two other companies.

How did Speckin Forensics, a Michigan company that gained notoriety for its audit of the election results in Arizona, land in a 14,000-person county on the other side of the country? They were hired at Lambert’s request after Ryan says Bachenberg used his sway to get the county commission to appoint the Michigan lawyer as Special Counsel. WakeTSI used its experience in Fulton County, Pa., to land its role in the Maricopa County, Arizona election audit.

Fulton County sued the Pennsylvania secretary of state over their decision, lost, and got sanctioned by the court.

“This was never about looking for dead people’s votes,” says Mike Ryan, who worked for 30 months with Bachenberg starting in February 2020, “This was about securing the 2024 election, no matter what.”

Ryan met with the FBI, as a prosecutor from Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office was present, at the Washington, D.C. Field Office this February. He provided relevant emails about the meeting to this author.

Significant information in this report comes from whistleblower Mike Ryan’s inside knowledge of the Bachenberg scheme, from which a daunting picture emerges of a combination of dark money from the retired cybersecurity CEO funneled through two lawyers and on to groups who unlawfully breached election systems in multiple states.

This story is also based upon information from two criminal indictments, one in Fulton County, Georgia, and another by a Special Prosecutor in Michigan, plus court filings from ongoing civil proceedings in Michigan federal court and between the Pennsylvania Secretary of State and Fulton County, Pa (both from the Special Master report and the final order of sanctions). In addition, it is supported by numerous public records from companies doing election audits of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, Arizona.

The sophisticated scheme was directed from Allentown, Pennsylvania, under the direction of the reclusive former NRA Board Member Bill Bachenberg. He founded and sold the cybersecurity firm DBSi in 2012, where he remained as a technical Senior Advisor. Until 2019, Bachenberg was an NRA board member.

In October 2020, Bachenberg made brief headlines with his “Sportsmen for Trump” group, which held a fundraiser at the Rod Of Iron Ministries, a church that worships the AR-15 rifle and descends from the religious group known as the Moonies. It turns out that Sportsmen for Trump was an official arm or coalition group of Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign with its own web subdomain.

A source once close to Sidney Powell with personal knowledge of her actions after November 2020 didn’t know about her alleged intrusion into Georgia’s election systems but spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe their personal recollection of the December 18th, 2020, White House meeting she attended with Patrick Byrne and Gen. Michael Flynn.

The source found it ironic that the December 18th meeting was cited for joining Powell to Fulton County’s RICO conspiracy indictment.

“There was such a distance between the two [Trump and Powell] on a meeting of the minds,” they said. “She was livid with the outcome of the meeting. She lost respect for him [Trump] because he wouldn’t do the crap she wanted him to do, and it was cray cray. That is accurate 100%.”

The meeting is described as Act 90 in her racketeering indictment. (Byrne reportedly scarfed down meatballs like popcorn from the president’s chef at said meeting.) Powell later cited Coffee County in draft executive orders she gave to then-President Trump at that meeting.

“That’s the [document that Trump didn’t even read,” Patrick Byrne told this author about the meeting, referring to the executive orders presented. “It was at the end of the presentation. Everyone in the room turned me down, including Trump. Twice.”

Byrne provided his first-hand account (pages 61-67) of the White House meeting in which he proposed having government agencies make images of election equipment in the “six anchor cities of six swing states, the obvious ones,” which he identified to this author as “Maricopa (Ariz.), Clark (Nev.), Wayne (Mi.), Milwaukee (Wi.), Fulton (Ga.), Philadelphia, Pa.” His account says they presented multiple proposed executive orders, more than the one above.

Sidney Powell’s November 2020 lawsuit in Georgia concerned only the Atlanta-area Cobb, Gwinett, and Cherokee counties, not Coffee County.

Emails from Powell connect her to the Coffee County, Georgia, election intrusion.

You can view whistleblower Mike Ryan’s own video about these election schemes here.

The Mayor of Miami just launched an illegal lottery to raise funds for his Republican presidential primary campaign.

It’s a dangerous maneuver to attempt to get onto the Republican primary debate stage.

And probably illegal, if not crimnal.

Posting a tweet to his 145,000 followers, Mayor Francis Suarez announced a lottery contest for his presidential primary donors to win soccer tickets for small dollar donations via a digital money transfer application or free entrants by postcard (tweet embedded at bottom). It reads:

The attached image says, “Paid for by Suarez for President Inc.”

It says a drawing date of July 20th.

Florida Statute 849.09 makes it illegal to accept money for a lottery in a game of chance.

Penalties for violations are first-degree misdemeanors.

Florida Statute 849.0395 forbids games of chance by charities that don’t disclose their rules, where their drawings take place, and other key details of these contests.

A person who offers the raffle for sale can be held liable for a second-degree misdemeanor.

He is also a member of the Republican party.

“He should know,” concluded the former Mayor. “He is an attorney.”

“Sounds pretty desperate like someone trying to buy friends,” says Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried, who knows this kind of law well, both as a lawyer and former Florida Department of Agriculture Commissioner overseeing illegal gambling laws.

The Mayor has been struggling to break through the 0% mark in national polling, not having reached his first poll at 1% yet. Having three polls at 1% is one of the requirements to make the first Republican primary debate.

According to Democratic pollster Fernand Amandi, he has only 5,000 donations of the 40,000 necessary to make the first primary debate on Fox News.

“Francis better hope it’s not illegal,” says Amandi about the new fundraising scheme, “because it sure looks illegal.”

Suarez did not reply to a request for comment to his personal cellphone.

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A leaked discussion transcript links a once-ascendant auto sensor company founder as the frontman for a bid to buy America’s iconic Forbes media empire, despite his utter lack of media experience.

It’s a story of intrigue surrounding the control of a media company reminiscent of the drama “Succession”—complete with same-named players—but the ramifications are real and stretch from Hong Kong to Moscow to Washington DC with a real-world significance far in excess of the hit HBO drama. The hit show even shot an episode released this spring in its concluding season at the tech founder’s $83 million mansion in Los Angeles’ tony Pacific Palisades enclave.

Two weeks ago, Axios reported that India’s largest media company Sun Group, and San Francisco-based venture firm Global Silicon Valley’s (GSV) bid for Forbes failed because of fear about federal scrutiny and that the group would try again with a high-net-worth American “like tech billionaires,” using primarily American capital.

Their links to Vladimir Putin’s Russian government led to a bipartisan uproar in Washington, DC, where such unanimity of thought is a rare commodity. A senior former intelligence official spoke on the record for this story to express concern that the federal board which reviews foreign investment in America must regulate the deal.

The leaked discussion transcript obtained by this author points to Austin Russell as the new point person seeking to buy Forbes Global Holdings with the Sun/GSV consortium’s backing.

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Russell is the CEO of Luminar Technologies, a formerly high-flying self-driving auto sensor startup that went public through a Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) deal. He dropped out of Stanford after receiving a $100,000 fellowship from billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel before that deal made him the youngest billionaire ever.

Two sources familiar with the thinking of seniormost management at Forbes believe Russell is financially backed in a play to purchase Forbes by the previously failed bidders Sun Group and GSV.

They say Austin Russell’s expected role is to be the general partner in the new Forbes buying group and that he could have to liquidate shares in his public company just to hold a minority stake in the global media conglomerate.

Shockingly, the sources indicated that despite his attempts to be the boss of Forbes, Russell has “no experience in the media,” leading other execs at the company to question why he’s involved but for the need to satisfy stricter regulatory requirements about foreign investments into the United States that raise national security concerns.

Even more unusually, the insiders noted that despite the auto parts entrepreneur’s pivotal role in the transaction, he has yet to converse with critical figures in Forbes’s upper management, an indication of either his inexperience or an uncommon disconnection from the purchase process.

They indicated that nobody knows where Russell would be able to raise the significant amount of funds needed to participate in the general partnership since selling a large number of his company’s shares could be difficult.

Notably, GSV’s partners in the Forbes deal alongside Sun Group also run another venture fund named Global Venture Alliance (GVA) which gave Luminar a stunningly large $20 million angel investment over six years ago. In addition, records leaked by a senior Capitol Hill official for this story point to GVA being linked to another one of the recently failed bidders to purchase Forbes. (shown below the story)

As the media deal moves, the Florida-based tech entrepreneur who is its new face is facing a raft of troubles at home as he expands his business abroad. His company’s valuation is sagging, down 80% from its highs, despite still trading today at 50 times revenues.

The former youngest billionaire even fell off the 2023 Forbes billionaire list.

His company Luminar is currently navigating a new plant opening in Mexico and a deal to bring in Taiwanese touch screen manufacturer TPK as an investor/partner, both positive developments.

However, a new $24 million lawsuit just landed in Florida’s Middle District federal court against him last week over the stock sale he used to buy his palatial home in LA, the very residence featured in “Succession.”

The fallout from a recent investor’s road show is ongoing. A YouTube video the company posted of his presentation showed competitors’ technology in his company’s investor roadshow, leading lawyers to advertise for class action litigants against the self-driving company.

Luminar deleted the video after Forbes reported it.

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International media empire for sale, Russia-linked buyers eventually emerge

The fortunes of the venerable Forbes publishing empire changed nine years ago when the Forbes family sold a majority of its shares to a Hong Kong-based group Integrated Whale Media Investment.

By 2021 the company was looking for new capital via its own SPAC deal, which fell apart in the summer of 2022 as rising interest rates.

A few months after that, Sun Group and San Francisco-based venture capital firm GVA emerged as the leading bidders for Forbes with an $800 million bid, along with another related investment fund named GSV.

Despite being an Indian company, the origins of Sun Group’s fortune emerged from business dealings in Russia.

Sun’s bid is led by Vice Chairman Shiv Khemka, whose ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin are not even slightly obscured. After the Russian Federation’s first invasion of Ukraine, a chorus of international financial sanctions reigned down on the country. That didn’t stop Khemka from appearing at RosCongress literally alongside Vladimir Putin later that spring, a video still on the Kremlin’s public website.

“Vladimir Putin took part in the plenary session of the 18^th St Petersburg International Economic Forum,” reads the Kremlin’s even description. “The Forum is taking place this year under the theme of Sustaining Confidence in a World Undergoing Transformation.”

Earlier this year, he told Fox’s Maria Bartiromo that he owns Sun Group.

Khemka’s social media profile on LinkedIn still lists his membership in the “Foreign Investment Advisory Council (Chaired by the Russian Prime Minister),” whose website indicates that Sun Group was still a member as recently as 2020.

Update: After publication, Khemka edited his LinkedIn profile to remove the reference to Russia’s FIAC. Here is a PDF copy of his profile.

GVA’s ties to the Russian oligarchy are well-established since its funds for the fund run by Pavel Cherkashin come from Suleyman Kerimov, the single man considered closest to Vladimir Putin. His partner in GVA is Magomed Musaev.

The Panama Papers revealed Kerimov’s dealings on behalf of Putin, including Kerimov’s transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars to the cellist Sergei Roldugin. Currently, Kerimov is serving in the Russian Federation Council as a representative of Dagestan. His term runs through 2026.

Likely not coincidentally, the largest investment into an American business that GVA has made was into a self-driving startup.

Yes, GVA backed Luminar Technologies with Kerimov’s money, the very same company Austin Russell founded, owns, and runs today.

In fact, Russell personally knows that his startup funds came directly from Kerimov, as The San Francisco Standard reports:

Luminar Technologies, a self-driving car company that launched with the help of $20 million of Kerimov’s wealth, actually did know whom they were dealing with, according to Gadzhiev, the oligarch’s nephew and money manager. He said Luminar’s founder Austin Russell met personally with Kerimov, and those meeting plans were corroborated by emails reviewed by The Standard.

That was totally legal at the time, but after both GVA and Luminar received its funding, Kerimov landed on the U.S. Treasury Department’s sanctions list in 2018 for his involvement in Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine as an official of the Government of Russia.

Last June, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) expanded those sanctions by blocking Kerimov’s billion-dollar U.S. trust last summer and further growing them to encompass sanctions on the entire Kerimov family and a “global network of financial facilitators, enablers, and others associated with” them in November 2022.

Here is a video of GVA’s Cherkashin acknowledging that his source of funds is Kerimov and declaring that it is the “sacred right” of anyone to invest in Silicon Valley in an October 2022 interview he gave to the Standard:

But why is a group of Russian-linked funders so interested in a business news website and magazine founded by an American family?

It’s not just about the iconic brand.

The same senior Capitol Hill official who shared a copy of the Forbes bid documents also provided a copy of documents circulating in the halls of Congress which shows why it is an especially attractive media property to any suitor.

Congress gets involved

The toxic combination of Russian money, Kremlin influence, and one of America’s most respected media brands led to an uproar on Capitol Hill in Washington, one that isn’t going away.

Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle were in unusual accord that the federal government must review the sale of Forbes.

A Republican sitting on the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the number three House Republican have both expressed open misgivings about a group linked to Putin buying Forbes.

Both members of Congress cited this Real Clear Policy story about the prior bid.

Congressman Eric Swalwell (D-CA) sits on the House Homeland Security Committee, and he told Politico that he wants to learn more about the transaction but “opposes any efforts by entities linked to the Chinese or Russian government attempting to acquire U.S. media companies.”

“We cannot have our foreign adversaries having massive platforms to reach the American people,” House Intel Committee member Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL) told Fox as the result of an official briefing on Sun’s ties to Russia’s military, “and to begin propagandizing. I mean, this is a war of ideas before it's a war of any type of conflict.”

“This is something the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) ought to take a look at,” says former U.S. National Intelligence Council Chairman Gregory Treverton to this author. He served under President Obama from 2014-2017.

The members of CFIUS consist mostly of America’s highest-ranked Senate-confirmed officials, including the Secretaries of Treasury, State, Defense, Energy, Justice, and Commerce, as well as the head of the Office of Science & Technology and the US Trade Representative.

“When I was running it,” says Treverton about the council, “we’d just look at Mergers, but they’ve expanded the charter since then.”

Indeed, on September 15th, 2022, President Joe Biden issued Executive Order 14083 to make it mandatory for CFIUS to provide oversight of any transaction involving large amounts of data of American citizens. The relevant text reads:

“[T]he Committee shall consider whether foreign investments in United States businesses that have access to or that store United States persons’ sensitive data, including health and biological data, involve a foreign person who might take actions that threaten to impair the national security of the United States as a result of the transaction, including whether the foreign person might have relevant third-party ties that might cause the transaction to pose such a threat.”

When reached for comment, Austin Russell’s phone rang six times and went to a full voicemail box. He did not respond to a text message asking for comment about his alleged involvement in buying Forbes. Lumniar did not respond to a contact on its website or via Twitter Direct Message about its current legal troubles.

This leaked document shows the involvement of multiple Russia-linked venture capital funds in a bid to buy Forbes:

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I know my pace of publication slowed down, but it’s only because I am gathering a LOT of moss like a rolling stone.

This is a conversation space in the Substack app that I set up exclusively for my subscribers…

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A leaked copy of the report a United States Senate committee is about to release slams the Trump Administration's response in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.

It also reveals that a chaotic government re-organization took place, which has never been reported before. 

The Senate Homeland Security and Government Accountability Committee (HSGAC) plans to release its 242-page report to the public tomorrow. This author obtained a copy of the embargoed report from a source on Capitol Hill without any restrictions on publication.

Its report focuses on the time period from the start of reports surfacing from China in late 2019 through June 2020.

Overall, the panel faulted the Trump Administration's leadership in no uncertain terms.

Summarizing the breakdowns, the report says the Trump administration failed at threat recognition, mounting a cohesive response or taking timely mitigation measures, and failed to communicate effectively with the public. The Senators conclude these failures:

"Resulted in the avoidable yet devastating loss of human life."

The Chief of FEMA's National Response Coordination Center later told Senate investigators that it was "a surreal experience reorganizing the government in two hours.” 

Using a whiteboard, the officials frantically designed an entirely new pandemic plan on the spot. A photo of the board is included in the report:

Yet, nothing the federal government planned in advance - while ignoring years of warnings about America's inadequate public health infrastructure across multiple administrations -  included re-organizing the government response 11 weeks into the pandemic around an agency with no public health experience. 

In late February, former president Trump took the pandemic response away from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), giving it instead to the White House Coronavirus Task Force led by Vice President Mike Pence. 

By March 11th, 2020, the Wall Street Journal reported that the HHS Director Alex Azar was "largely sidelined" from leading the pandemic response.

It would still be two days before Trump declared an emergency on March 13th, avoiding a cash crunch that the senate report noted was affecting HHS because of the administration's failed attempts to downplay the pandemic. 

And when the president did declare an emergency, he used two different laws, one of which had never been used for a pandemic or public health crisis. Thus, he designated two agencies as equals. 

Unbeknownst to the public, on March 18th, former President Trump initiated a second major reorganization of the pandemic response to resolve the conflict.

That's when sidelined America's top health agency HHS in favor of tapping the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) after a single meeting with its Director, ordering them to lead the response to the Covid-19 pandemic. 

FEMA's Director had not participated in any of the White House Coronavirus Task force meetings up until that point, but after a March 18th meeting with Trump, he returned to the West Wing twice more that day.

Former Vice President Pence then seconded the order at a later meeting of the task force with Azar present, amongst others, handing off authority outside of controlling messaging. 

According to the Senate report, that decision led to "unclear agency roles between HHS and FEMA."

"Despite FEMA’s new role as the lead federal agency for the pandemic response," says the report, "FEMA officials told the Committee that HHS retained the lead on all public health matters."

The FDA also claimed to senate investigators that it experienced significant confusion from the second reorganization that took time to resolve.

Despite FEMA's prowess at logistics, the government's emergency relief distribution system continued to neglect New York's desperate need for supplies and stuck with proportionate distribution during the early phase of the coronavirus pandemic. 

Azar was reduced to passively sending suggestions down the chain of command to his own subordinates at the HHS Administration for Strategic Preparedness & Response (ASPR): 

“I’m out of this but might I suggest to you all and the FEMA leadership that we might want to surge PPE into NYC. 90% of new cases are from NY and mostly NYC. We need to relieve the pressure there. But not my call.”

Emblematic of the challenges faced during the COVID-19 pandemic, officials from FEMA characterized it as a "continuity of society event." 

Even some of those from the HHS' preparedness agency admitted that they were not prepared for the scope of the emergency.

Most officials eventually credited FEMA with improving the Trump administration's pandemic response. However, the federal government's move away from science-driven communication - another key area of the vast report - is faulted for leaving the public vulnerable during the height of the public health emergency. Eventually, Trump's team sidelined the HHS' emergency preparedness agency altogether, per the report.

To the former administration's credit, the senate report does credit its "Operation Warp Speed" with the rapid deployment of quality vaccines later in the year.

"The Trump Administration waited until March 16, 2020—fifty-five days from the date of the first confirmed case—to implement its first wide-scale attempt at nationwide mitigation of viral spread," states the Senate report.

The report concluded that "initial federal response and actions taken by the Trump Administration at the time did not reflect the severity of the crisis and ultimately failed to effectively mitigate the spread of COVID-19."

Here is a photo of the whiteboard FEMA officials used to reorganize the government's pandemic response in two "surreal" hours:

Just wanted to thank all of the new subscribers and the old ones for chipping in to support my investigative journalism. On that note, I wanted to share a little bit about what is to come in the next week…

Yes! Very soon.

I’m in the process of reporting a few big stories simultaneously.

First amongst them is a report that I started in May.

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The Executive Office of the Governor of Florida and Florida’s Department of Transportation just released two sets of records with the contracts, quotations, and parameters of their program that lured asylum seekers under false pretenses on flights to the island of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. (Documents linked at the bottom.)

In its haste to carry out the governor’s program to transport undocumented immigrants, the state let its chosen vendor skip using the protocols necessary to make sure they limited flights to the right people, chose the highest bidder, prepaid the contract before the flights took place, and omitted its reporting requirements from the contract.

FDOT prepaid in full for the service one day after the final quotation for what its vendor described as “Project 1.”

Despite Florida’s strong public records law requiring immediate production of these records, which were requested 22-days ago, the Governor’s office and FDOT took over three weeks from the time of the request to produce two sets of documents (shown below) totaling 81-pages. Even though all of the records appear to be from FDOT, the Governor’s office produced one set of records, and the transport agency produced a different set of documents 55-minutes apart after the close of business on a Friday.

“The documents in this request for quotes outline a procedure that was not followed,” says attorney Daniel W. Uhlfelder who assisted in obtaining the records from FDOT. “Contractor responsibilities are very detailed but do not appear to have been followed.”

On September 7th, FDOT approved hiring the private aviation company Vertol Systems Company Inc. to charter two airplanes that transported 50 Venezuelan asylum seekers and pre-paying for their services pursuant to their quotation for services provided only a single day earlier.

Six days later, Vertol Systems chartered two planes to fly to San Antonio, then on to Crestview, Florida, and into the Carolinas before landing in Martha’s Vineyard with 50 migrants who legally entered the United States. Vertol Systems conducted the flights in facially apparent violation of the attached Florida state budget appropriation to “facilitate the transport of unauthorized aliens from this state consistent with federal law.”

The reason Vertol Systems didn’t bother ensuring that they were, in fact, transporting non-citizens who were not documented is that FDOT either ignored or accepted that they had none of the extensive protocols outlined in the “FDOT Relocation Program” documents provided by the Governor’s office.

Records from the Governor’s office show that the program’s “Request for Quote” specified four detailed deliverables:

1. Establish Procedure to Receive Requests from Partner Agencies

2. Establish Procedure for Determining Eligibility for Relocation

3. Deliverable 3- Provide Transportation and all AncillaryServices

4. Provide Reports

Ultimately, the state chose a contractor in Vertol Systems who only listed a single deliverable in their proposal: transport.

FDOT also selected the highest of the two bidders.

Florida paid over $12,000 per immigrant for the services.

Per the program’s legislative appropriation, the state was required to obtain at least two bids prior to issuing a contract, which it did do. A charter membership company also provided its brochure to FDOT’s general counsel, which the governor’s office released in response to public records requests.

The records indicate that the second bidder is Gun Girls Inc., a prison transport company with existing state contracts.

“The quote I gave is for a contract that did not happen,” said Gun Girls Inc.’s President Susan Kushlin in a telephone interview. “We were going to be doing ground transport or by commercial air transport.”

She explained that her company “hasn’t done anything because they’re (FDOT) getting the paperwork together. As a woman-owned company that does prison transport, we do everything by the book.”

Indeed, the Gun Girls Inc. proposal included all four deliverables sought by the state:

If the state chose to transport people from northern Florida to Massachusetts by commercial flight or ground transport, then the cost would’ve been less than half of what it ultimately paid to Vertol Systems.

In fact, according to the quotation provided by Gun Girls Inc. to state officials, the transport of immigrants was specifically from a “TBD Florida Location.”

None of the Vertol Systems proposals mentioned an origination point for the persons to be transported.

Ultimately, the records show it was FDOT’s Director of the Office of Administration, Stephanie Iliff, two rungs down the org chart from the department’s secretary Jared Perdue, who approved the transportation pre-payment.

“It is clear, based on these documents, that there was little effort to ensure proper entity was hired for this project,” concluded the lawyer Uhlfelder. “It is characterized as a humanitarian project including requirements to coordinate with various government agencies. This wasn’t humanitarian at all.”

Here are the complete contracts and records produced:

Exclusively obtained public records help to explain why two charter flights hired by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis landed in a public airport in northwest Florida as part of his deceptive, potentially illegal political stunt targeting 50 Venezuelan immigrants.

Significantly, the newly released documents from Okaloosa County incontrovertibly places the two chartered aircrafts inside Florida after arriving from Texas.

It also confirms the state’s use of the two charter planes having tail numbers N359SK and N411FJ to transport 50 Venezuelan immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.

That’s an important point for those who believe Governor DeSantis overstepped his authority under the state’s 2022 budget which contains a line authorizing transportation from the state but not into the state.

“With the aid of Florida’s sunshine law we were able to quickly verify certain facts because the airport Ron DeSantis decided to use as part of this scheme was a county airport,” says attorney Daniel Uhlfelder, who helped expedite the records request. “Even the Governor isn’t able to escape disclosure and cover up his misdeeds.“

An interview with a civil aviation expert reveals the state may have paid as much as $61,000 to its charter flight broker, just in fees, to retain the jets used to transport migrants across state lines this week, which Florida’s Governor bragged about to political donors last week.

Another member of the Florida Cabinet called it a “political stunt” and asked the Department of Justice to investigate.

Okaloosa County owns Bob Sikes Airport (CEW) and the records from its Fixed Base Operator indicate that the two planes owned by Ultimate Air Shuttle and chartered by Vertol Systems Company Inc. of Destin, Florida on behalf of the state, show that each plane fueled up using a Shell aviation credit card.

In addition to taking on a combined $4606 worth of Jet A fuel at CEW, the records show that both planes discharged their lavatories after their initial 750-mile journey. It’s just over 1,400 miles from Crestview to Martha’s Vineyard.

But that wouldn’t be enough to get to its final destination.

The approximately twenty-year-old Fairchild-Dornier 328 aircraft frames have a range of approximately 1,700 miles when equipped with a long-range fuel tank, but the Ultimate Jet Charters website says their version has only a 1,000 mile range with 30 passengers.

According to publicly available flight data, one of the planes stopped in Charlotte, North Carolina and the other in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

Chad Trautvetter is the news editor of Aviation International News and AINOnline.com, as well as its daily newsletter. He explained that anyone with “a phone can become a charter flight broker” and that “typically brokers earn about 10% of the overall airfare, unless they’re charging a flat fee.”

Florida taxpayers didn’t just pay to fly the Venezuelan immigrants from Texas to Massachusetts.

“The charter company would’ve charged for the reposition flight which they call an “empty leg” that is included in the price,” said Trautvetter. “The state paid for the leg down from Ohio and Charlotte too.”

The two charter flights contracted by the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) picked up the asylum seekers and departed from San Antonio, Texas, on the morning of Wednesday, September 14th at an apparent cost of $615,000 per records unearthed by Florida Democratic gubernatorial nominee Charlie Crist and shared in a tweet.

FDOT contracted with Vertol to hire Ultimate Shuttles for the flights.

Vertol Systems Company Inc. started in Oregon but moved to Florida recently, according to Forensic News, who reported exclusively on its contracts with recently sanctioned Russian aviation companies. The company took its website down this weekend after its role as a charter broker to the state was revealed, but a video screen capture shows how it looked on Friday:

According to the migrants on the plane and local sources in San Antonio, a Texas woman known only as “Perla” recruited the Venezuelan immigrants onto the flight under false pretenses.

She told them they were going to Boston.

From the Lonestar State, both airplanes flew directly to Crestview, Florida, before making separate stops in the Carolinas before transporting the asylum seekers eventually to the island of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.

Trautvetter raised serious questions about the operator’s requirements under Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) regulations requiring all passengers to be identified and disclosed on commercially operated charters.

“Did they issue IDs to asylum seekers?” he asked. “How did the charter operators verify those IDs?”

“As a charter company, they would have to know who is on board, so they would have to collect IDs from all of the passengers,” the news editor explained. “After 9/11, the government started mandating that you have to know who’s on board and verify it with ID checks.”  

“The charter company may have broken TSA regulations by not verifying the passengers IDs if it did not do so. But that’s just a guess.”

A Freedom of Information Act request seeking flight plans and manifests to the FAA still hasn’t been answered.

The Executive Office of the Governor of Florida has confirmed reciept of seven public records request seeking details about the flights, but has not yet produced any records.

Leaked documents expose what multiple former prosecutors describe as the improper influence of politics in handling a felony charge leveled against Florida’s Covid-19 whistleblower Rebekah Jones.

The story of Rebekah Jones’s journey from an unknown Florida Department of Health (FDOH) employee to a whistleblower to a congressional candidate began with the outbreak of the novel coronavirus pandemic at the end of 2019.

Two weeks ago, the day after she won a Democratic congressional primary to face off against Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), state attorneys offered her a significantly worse deal to end a long-running criminal case against Jones, raising the appearance of impropriety.

Paper copies of public records with the state’s discussion of a plea deal arrived at this reporter’s place of business, depicting a process stalled until the results of Jones’ primary became available. (Author’s note: The documents have been redacted to remove personal contact information, which could be used to harass the lawyers.)

State attorneys pursuing charges against Jones began negotiating a plea bargain in June, according to her recent interview in an educational publication. But the newly obtained public records show that the outline of a final DPA appeared to be on the table in late July.

However, Georgia Cappleman, the head of Felony Division D in the 2nd judicial circuit’s State Attorney’s office, nonetheless waited until the day after she won the state’s 1st congressional district Democratic primary to make a new, harsher offer.

Three former prosecutors who are in private practice today called it a politically motivated move.

“How did you get this?” asked Rebekah Jones when sent a request for comment about the documents before referring the matter to her lawyers.

“No comment,” said her lawyer Tom Findley before abruptly hanging up.

It was Chief assistant state attorney Georgia Cappleman who sent an offer on July 25th, which only required Jones to pay a $100 fee to the SAO, admit guilt, and perform 150 hours of community service to have the charges dropped in a Deferred Prosecution Agreement (DPA).

At the time, she told lawyers for Jones that she had just then returned from vacation. Four days later, the Chief said she had to “consult with many folks” before the SAO would approve the deal.

Then, despite presumably being just back from vacation, Cappleman went radio silent from July 29th through August 24th, exactly one day after Rebekah Jones won her Democratic primary with 62% of the vote.

That is when the assistant state attorney raised her office’s plea demands to include a greater than $21,000 payment to the Florida Department of Law enforcement, withdrawal of her whistleblower claim filed with the Florida Commission on Human Rights before her arrest, and to waive all future civil claims against the state over her employment.

What is most puzzling about the enlarged conditions Cappelman outlined to settle the case is that the prosecutor requested the return of data which the National Review and later the Florida Governor’s office both claim that she did not possess.

Prosecutors cited Jones’ remarks in a podcast interview which she recorded this spring to advance their new claim.

“No,” said Cappleman by phone when asked for comment to confirm that her office offered a Deferred Prosecution Agreement to Jones. “We cannot comment on plea negotiations at all.”

“She has indicated that she does not wish to resolve the case with a plea,” said the prosecutor, “and it has been set for trial.”

Here are the newly proposed terms:

Former prosecutors weigh in on the offer to Jones.

“It certainly doesn’t look good,” wrote former prosecutor Robert Scavone, Jr., by email, who from 2017 through earlier this year worked at the Palm Beach County, Florida, state attorney’s office.

When asked if the timing of the DPA negotiations constituted the appearance of impropriety, Scavone Jr. is a legal podcaster and former law clerk to Judge Barbara Lagoa, now sitting on the federal 11th circuit court of appeals, wrote, “Prosecuting offices must avoid politics like the plague. The integrity of the system and public trust depends on it. The fact that the conditions of the DPA became more harsh after the primaries seems unusual, to say the least. But I do want to point out that I do not have all of the facts. Sometimes correlation is not causation.”

“I’m calling bullshit,” said Susy Ribero-Ayala, a Coral Gables, Florida, criminal defense lawyer in private practice with experience at the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s office. “I’m seeing more of these politically charged investigations during election season. This is the kind of thing you see in 3rd world countries to deter people from running for office.”

“This is like Comey and the Clinton emails. Same thing” concluded Ribero-Ayala.

“This is looking like the prosecutor who got swayed by political forces,” said civil rights lawyer Melba Pearson by phone, who spent three years as the ACLU of Florida’s Deputy Director after a 14-year stint at the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s office. “When they made the initial offer, that to me indicated the prosecutor’s real view of the worth of the case. When you start talking about $20,000 and major community service and dropping a whistleblower retaliation lawsuit, that speaks to me of politics.”

“This plea is completely coercive, as dictated by certain political elements. A prosecutor should not allow themselves to be treated as a pawn,” says Pearson, who ran for Miami-Dade State Attorney as a Democrat in 2020, about the disparate plea deals introduced only the day after the end of a political primary. “That’s not justice.”

Furthermore, each former prosecutor particularly made remarks about the use of the state attorney’s office to seek release from civil liability from Jones, whose whistleblower complaint to the Florida Commission on Human Rights is still ongoing.

“Prosecutors should not be wading into civil matters, not in the state of Florida,” said Pearson about the State Attorney’s request for a waiver of all claims of “discrimination, harassment, and retaliation” by Jones against the Florida Department of Health.

“As a former prosecutor, I would say it is your job to prosecute crimes, not to preclude civil lawsuits against any other agency or person. You have to remain independent, judge the facts independently, and not put politics in the equation,” Ribero-Ayala commented on the state’s request of the famous whistleblower. “For example, I represented a police officer with 40 years experience who got wrongfully arrested, and I got a copy of the video which proved was an unlawful arrest by the City of Coral Gables. The SAO was going to no action [dismiss] the case, and they *asked* if he would not sue, but they would not put it in writing.” (Speaker’s emphasis)

When asked if it’s appropriate for a prosecutor to ask a criminal defendant to waive their rights to a civil case against the State in a criminal plea deal, Scavone Jr. replied, “This would not be appropriate from my perspective. For example, the State should not ask a criminal defendant to dismiss an excessive force claim against the officers in the criminal case as a condition of the plea. And in that situation, the civil and criminal matters would be related.”

“I recall a case where we charged a county employee with using a county computer system to commit fraud,” Scavone Jr. continued, “As part of the plea, the employee had to voluntarily resign from the county. In a way, that was a “resolution” to an employment matter. The important point here is that there was a nexus between the charged crime and the employment, so I think it was appropriate. But, if by “resolution” you mean asking a defendant to drop a civil lawsuit, then no; I do not think that would be appropriate, especially if the criminal conduct and civil matter are unrelated.”

The messages from Chief assistant state attorney Cappelman seem to indicate that the “stakeholders” she consulted may have been agencies outside of law enforcement.

“From a practical and moral perspective, you want to make sure what you’re doing is in the public interest and not unduly prosecuting an individual,” says Pearson about the unusual situation. “While a prosecutor should listen to stakeholders in a case, they shouldn’t blindly follow their demands for punishment.”

Today, prosecutors filed formal documents indicating that they will seek to take the case to trial against Jones next January.

But a plea bargain agreement can be entered any time prior to a trial or its conclusion.

“Jones is a whistleblower trying to surface information that people want to remain hidden,” remarked Melba Pearson about the broader circumstances of the case. “That alone could be enough to sway a jury to a not guilty verdict.”

From state employee to whistleblower

In her previous employment at the state Department of Health, Rebekah Jones designed the state of Florida’s graphical information system to present case data in early 2020 at the start of the global pandemic. It was part of the Covid-19 response in Florida, which former President Trump regularly lauded.

But by mid-May 2020, Jones started to speak out about what she believed to be pressure from above to manipulate the state’s virus data for political reasons after she was terminated for bringing her concerns to management at FDOH.

That July, she filed a whistleblower complaint alleging workplace retaliation with the Florida Commission on Human Relations, the one prosecutors want her to abandon today.

On December 7th, 2020, officers from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement raided Jones’ home with their guns drawn, confiscating her cell phones, computers, and other gear. The following January, Jones filed suit against the police over the raid, and two days after the first hearing in the civil case, prosecutors filed a single 3rd-degree felony charge against her, alleging unlawful computer access in order to send a single email message.

Earlier this year, two reports came out, one from FDOH’s inspector general assessing Rebekah Jones’ whistleblower claims and the second from FDOH’s data auditor. The inspector general’s report did not find sufficient evidence to take disciplinary action against Jones’ supervisors, all of whom have since left the agency. The data auditor’s report concluded that the state of Florida undercounted Covid cases and deaths.

Thirty years ago today, Hurricane Andrew’s northern eyewall raked my childhood home in Kendall, delaying my first day of high school. The afternoon before, when we all knew a monster storm was coming, I picked up an old Olympus camera my father owned, which used minimal batteries, and shot a bunch of before photos of my neighborhood, keeping it ready for what was to come, which turned out to be utter devastation. 

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The next morning, I took photos of the look of horror on my neighbor’s faces after. Cat 5 storm rammed through, a feeling I shared watching my lush neighborhood transform into what I imagined a war zone to look like. Except that, unlike a war zone, the enemy has evaporated into thin air, and some of our local pine trees suddenly looked like they had mohawk hair-style haircuts on their limbs as the winds snapped two-inch diameter branches like so many toothpicks. People found roof tiles inside of their glass block windows. We found decorative window shutters on our front patio, and our house had none.

That first week, we were in shock; my family, myself, and our neighbors were outdoors all days working on roofs, clearing debris, and bailing out the newly created indoor swimming pool where our sunken pit living room had once resided in the house. Two weeks later, a former neighbor who had recently relocated to North Carolina Drove a loaded U-Haul truck filled with relief supplies down to demolished South Dade, returning home with my sister and me.

That week, our host was contacted by the town’s local newspaper, The Highlander, about her trip to the disaster zone; and her two return passengers. We developed the film (something I always struggled to get done in that era which is why I didn’t really get into photography until digital).

The newspaper printed my picture in the story.

It was my first published item in a news publication anywhere. 

The Miami of today came about in many ways because of that manic Monday morning but populated with only people who decided they wanted to stick around and rebuild in what used to be a really scary, crime-ridden city and one with a tremendous work shortage plus a real estate price depression.

But some of us stayed. Other people arrived looking for opportunities in the chaos. Many of us were too young to make that decision for ourselves, but here we all are today, in part the product of those choices.

Hurricane Andrew was a fateful day for all of Miami. It became a barometer forever of what everyone here would do in a real crisis. But those of us who stayed bonded around the shared hardships of no AC in August, living in shattered houses, driving on streets with no signs or signals, and with torn apart, social networks separated by barriers unthinkable in today’s connected era.

Here’s the picture:

The official press secretary to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is risking significant, even criminal penalties, according to a legal expert.

Florida Gov. DeSantis’ spokeswoman Christina Pushaw registered as a foreign agent on June 6th, 2022, under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

But when she did register, public records prove conclusively that she materially omitted a significant amount of her past foreign lobbying activities when belatedly registering with the United States Department of Justice’s National Security Division last month. (document at the bottom of the story)

Furthermore, the filings prove that some of her past political propaganda publishing apparently violates mandatory legal disclosure requirements.

Christina Pushaw is required by FARA to register her activities within 10-days of agreeing to be a foreign agent and prior to starting.

Yet, she registered four and a half years late, long after starting that she belatedly disclosed her paid relationship with the foreign principal Mikheil Saakashvili, the now-imprisoned former President of Georgia.

Pushaw submitted a 3-part 164-page filing to the DOJ’s Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) Unit Public Office.

You can read her complete FARA filings here.

Her disclosures reveal the now-Press Secretary to the Florida Governor’s extensive ghost-writing campaign for Saakashvili and his wife.

Pushaw also reported her personal publication of her political propaganda to further Saakashvili’s goals in a prominent GOP-aligned think tank’s editorial journal, but her writing lacks legally required disclosures under FARA, another violation of the law.

A review of her resume and application for work submitted with her signed certifications of truthfulness to the State of Florida reveals something more troubling, according to national experts in foreign lobbying compliance.

When asked for comment, the Department of Justice issued this response from Wyn Hornbuckle, Deputy Director of the Office of Public Affairs, by email:

“Regarding your question about how FARA jurisdiction may or may not apply to someone living overseas, we’ll decline to comment. We typically will not comment on hypothetical scenarios as many unknown factors may apply.”

Foreign lobbying of U.S. officials was disclosed to the state of Florida, not to the Department of Justice

By Christina Pushaw’s own hand, she says that her foreign agency and lobbying efforts aimed at U.S. government officials were more extensive than she disclosed to the DOJ about her “political inspiration,” the now-imprisoned former president of Georgia.

The disclosures by Pushaw in a document submitted to obtain public employment raise the question of how many other foreign principals have directed the Mailbu-born graduate of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

The Florida Governor’s press secretary’s resume has been a public record ever since the Tampa Bay Times requested it a year ago.

The Florida Governor hired her based upon that resume and her body of writing at an annual salary of $120,000, according to the official state employee disclosure website FloridaHasARightToKnow.com.

However, nobody else has reported on the details inside of it, in which Pushaw plainly admits to lobbying the Georgian U.S. embassy on behalf of a foreign political party and presumptively its leader.

It proves conclusively that she says she was a foreign lobbyist for a second foreign principal that she hasn’t disclosed to the DOJ.

The fifth bullet point in her listing as a Campaign Strategist for former Georgian presidential candidate Gregory Vashadze reads: “Managed strategic communications with international (US/EU) stakeholders, including government officials and multinational election observation missions (OSCE, Parliamentary Assemblies, etc.); wrote weekly memos for stakeholders; briefed diplomats, U.S. officials and monitoring delegations.”

The last line specifically denotes that she lobbied American government officials on behalf of a Vashadze, a foreign principal.

“When located outside the US, if she were continuing to lobby US officials in any way, that would strengthen the idea that she was acting as an agent within the United States,” explained University of Pennsylvania law professor Claire Finkelstein, who served as part of the American Bar Association’s task force on FARA reform in an interview conducted before Pushaw registered her foreign agency work at the DOJ’s insistence. “It sounds like she’s engaged in lobbying for a foreign principal, but there are other acts that might not be cognizable under FARA.”

When I brought this matter to Professors Finkelstein and University of Minnesota law professor Richard W. Painter's attention, it was without telling them the name, country, or state of the foreign lobbyist, but with an accurate description to them of the acts above which Pushaw omitted from her June 6th filing. Copies of all records were provided to them for their inspection and any further commentary afterward.

“There’s a lot here,” said Finkelstein referring to the rest of the resume, which mentions handling international affairs for Georgian political parties and her own nonprofit group activities, all of which do not explicitly say in Pushaw’s own words that they trigger a registration requirement. “The issue is whether or not the person was acting within the United States.”

“When you’re undertaking those activities for a foreign politician, I think they require registration because you’re contacting the US government on behalf of a foreign politician,” said Richard Painter, who served as chief ethics counsel in the Bush White House. “That goes to the core of what FARA is all about. It seems to me that needs to be disclosed.”

“There are two sets of issues,” Painter explained, “the reporting under the FARA and whether they met the statute. It’s obligatory, and failure to report can be criminal.”

“There’s a second issue,” the former White House ethics counsel said, continuing to outline the pitfalls of being a late registrant with the DOJ and making an incomplete filing, “is that when you do file a report with the US government, any part of the government, and it’s false. If you knowingly make false statements to any part of the US government, then you can be in violation of 18 USC 1001, the false statements statute.”

“If you file a FARA application and you say you’re doing A, and you don’t disclose AB & C, or you say your foreign principal is X, but it’s really XY&Z, then at some point you could have made a false representation to the DOJ,” explained Painter as a hypothetical example after hearing Pushaw’s situation but without names or countries.”

What meets the definition of a material omission that rises to the level of an act that the federal government can charge a citizen with a crime?

“A material omission is generally understood to be a misrepresentation,” explained Painter, “if the omission is something required to be said for something not to be materially misleading. If you’re concealing something intentionally, then I think that material omission would probably be a violation of 18 USC 1001.”

Perversely, Christina Pushaw has used her newfound Twitter following to jest about others being unregistered foreign-agent lobbyists, while she herself was a secretly and unlawfully unregistered foreign agent.

The Department of Justice’s website says that in addition to civil remedies, the penalty for a “willful violation of FARA is imprisonment for not more than five years, a fine of up to $250,000, or both. Certain violations are considered misdemeanors, with penalties of imprisonment of not more than six months, a fine of not more than $5,000, or both.”

Pushaw did not reply to requests for comment sent by email, SMS message, phone call or voicemail at the time of publication, nor has the Executive Office of the Governor responded to requests for comment by phone or email.

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Disclosure problems

Christina Pushaw wrote a story about Ukraine and her boss Saakashvili in The National Interest, which she included in her FARA registrations.

Formerly known as the Nixon Center, the Center for the National Interest publishes that website. The Center gained national infamy for hosting a controversial meeting between then-presumptive 2016 Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and the Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

Later, it was revealed that The National Interest had also published a story about Russian-American affairs and the GOP by eventually convicted spy Maria Butina, who infiltrated the NRA with Putin’s emissary and met with Donald Trump Jr.

Notably, Pushaw’s article “Ukraine's New President Prioritizes Campaign Promise to Change the Country” lacks any of the legally required notification to readers that it is political propaganda on behalf of a foreign principal under 22 U.S.C. § 614.

In fact, the only reason we know that article was a political propaganda piece is that she disclosed it to the DOJ in her informational materials.

Instead, it directly misrepresents her to the readers as a “former advisor” to Saakashvili.

Christina Pushaw holds a MA in European & Eurasian Studies from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). She has served as an advisor to politicians in Eastern Europe, including Mikheil Saakashvili. She is based in Tbilisi, Georgia and Washington, DC. 

That statute regulates the “filing and labeling of political propaganda.” Section (b) requires an identification statement on all materials.

The FARA unit maintains an FAQ to assist in compliance with this specific law on its website, which reads:

WHAT SHOULD THE CONSPICUOUS STATEMENT SAY?

This material is distributed by (name of registrant) on behalf of (name of foreign principal).  Additional information is available at the Department of Justice, Washington, DC.  

“It seems quite clear that she was acting as a foreign agent and that she didn’t fully disclose that,” says Painter, noting that her other ghostwritten stories do not require those disclosures to comply, merely filing them with the DOJ. “If she made a misleading FARA filing, she needs to fix it.”

The National Ineterest did not respond to an email request for comment, nor did the Center for the National Interest answer their phone during business hours or return a voicemail seeking comment.

Eighteen months ago, virtually nobody knew who Christina Pushaw was, but a media campaign she launched as a columnist in a right-wing blog named “Human Events” ultimately led her to become Fl. Gov. DeSantis’ mouthpiece.

She wrote a story about controversial whistleblower Rebekah Jones and followed it up with a puff piece on the Florida governor.

Then Christina Pushaw wrote a very nice message to Governor DeSantis on March 19th, 2021, the day after the publication of her second story entitled “RON DESANTIS VERSUS THE “PARTY OF SCIENCE.”

In her message to the former Congressman from Daytona Beach turned presidential front-runner today, she said that his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic inspired her to move to Florida (which he had not actually done).

She also then asked if there was an opening on his communications team, according to a Tampa Bay Times report last summer based on her employment application.

Between her email and her eventual start date, Pushaw became entangled in a legal matter with Jones, who accused her of cyberstalking and harassment last April. It ended four months later in a nolle prosequi decision from the Montgomery County District Court, but not after both sides engaged in a series of false representations. Pushaw pretended that the case had nothing to do with her when asked, which was a lie. She had obtained effective legal counsel to beat the charges. Jones claimed the forthcoming trial was to ratify a plea deal; it was not.

The end results are documented completely and in full here in a set of court documents from the Rockville courthouse that speak for themselves.

Just over a month after Christina’s interactions with Jones in Maryland sparked the four-month feud, she submitted this application for employment to the State of Florida with her resume containing proof that she was an unregistered foreign agent and certified its truthfulness.

Less than one month after Gov. DeSantis hired Pushaw as his Press Secretary, he made her the communications director for an event in Miami to sign a bill and executive order to combat corporate espionage, and foreign influence.

Click here to view the complete application and resume with personal information redacted: